Six Legs Better

A Cultural History of Myrmecology

Charlotte Sleigh

Publication Year: 2007

Ants long have fascinated linguists, human sociologists, and even cyberneticians. At the end of the nineteenth century, ants seemed to be admirable models for human life and were praised for their work ethic, communitarianism, and apparent empathy. They provided a natural-theological lesson on the relative importance of humans within creation and inspired psychologists to investigate the question of instinct and its place in the life of higher animals and humans. By the 1930s, however, ants came to symbolize one of modernity's deepest fears: the loss of selfhood. Researchers then viewed the ant colony as an unthinking mass, easily ruled and slavishly organized.
In this volume, Charlotte Sleigh uses specific representations of ants within the field of entomology from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries to explore the broader role of metaphors in science and their often unpredictable translations. Marking the centenary of the coining of "myrmecology" to describe the study of ants, Six Legs Better demonstrates the remarkable historical role played by ants as a node where notions of animal, human, and automaton intersect.

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed in one way or another to the writing of this book,
and I should like to thank them for their often very generous help. I owe my greatest
gratitude to John Forrester, for getting the whole project started and for his
ongoing support and advice. For their oral recollections of some of the historical ...

Introduction

“Begone, vile insect.” With these words, Doctor Frankenstein greets his monstrous
creation on the icy slopes of Montanvert.1 The creature, with admirable
insouciance, replies, “I expected this reaction.” Frankenstein’s outburst attempts
to downplay the monster’s hideous threat by reducing him to the stature of a ...

Part I

The bucolic valley basin view from the bedroom window was a mixed pleasure
for Auguste Forel. At times it made him furious. For this fanatical abstainer’s
home overlooked mile upon mile of vineyards. The grapes against whose alcoholic
product he spent his life inveighing grew practically up to the front door. ...

Chapter One. Evolutionary Myrmecology and the Natural History of the Human Mind

The bucolic valley basin view from the bedroom window was a mixed pleasure
for Auguste Forel. At times it made him furious. For this fanatical abstainer’s
home overlooked mile upon mile of vineyards. The grapes against whose alcoholic
product he spent his life inveighing grew practically up to the front ...

Auguste Forel’s reassuringly Swiss ants seemed anything but familiar to other myrmecologists. In 1918 the French insect psychologist Eugène Bouvier at-tempted to do justice to the bizarreness of the insect realm that so fascinated. Insects are creatures which seem to defy the imagination with the strangeness of their form and their extraordinary habits...What can we think of the predatory...

Part II Sociological Ants

Irascible, brilliant, philosophical, depressive, anti-Semitic, elitist, obscene:
William Morton Wheeler (1865–1937) was a memorable man to all who encountered
him. He could not have been more different from the serious, idealistic,
and patriarchal Forel—not least because of his fondness for the ...

Chapter Three. From Psychology to Sociology

What made Milwaukee famous was anathema to Forel, but very much home
to Wheeler. The Wisconsin town of Wheeler’s birth was populated and lubricated
by German émigrés—beer-drinking liberals rather like the Munich inhabitants
Forel had found so uncongenial.1 As a youth, Wheeler became involved with ...

Chapter Four. The Brave New World of Myrmecology

While Wheeler was watching the ants feed each other, the human ants of
Forel’s Etats Unis de la Terre were doing the same. Amid the hardships of the
Great War, the young Herbert Hoover was busy providing nutrition for the hungry
millions of Europe. As chairman for the Commission for Relief in Belgium ...

Chapter Five. The Generic Contexts of Natural History

Despite having achieved academic success beyond that of his entomological
peers, William Morton Wheeler found that he was dogged by old accusations of
“mere” natural historicism. As some of his peers at the Woods Hole Marine Biological
Laboratory rede>ned biology in terms of benchwork, Wheeler pondered ...

Chapter Six. Writing Elite Natural History

"Naturalists may attempt to achieve a scientific objectivity toward the creatures
they study, but fortunately for editors they invariably fail.” With this sneaky
compliment Alan Ternes, editor of Natural History magazine, introduced a collection
of essays by the staff of the American Museum of Natural ...

Chapter Seven. Ants in the Library: An Interlude

At this point the story of myrmecology takes an unexpected turn. As a discipline,
it lacked direction after death of Wheeler in 1937. William Creighton’s massive
taxonomy of North American ants (1950) was of little interest to anyone
besides collectors, and T. C. Schneirla’s ant psychology of the late 1940s and early ...

Part III Communicational Ants

In 1909 a young and eager would-be scientist received noti>cation of his >rst
ever publication. The paper, a comparative discussion of ant colonies, was to be
published in The Guide to Nature; the young scientist’s name was Norbert
Wiener. That same year (at the remarkable age of sixteen) he began graduate ...

Images

Chapter Eight. The Macy Meanings of Meaning

In the sweet heat of postwar Munich in summer, the drone of bombers gave
way to the softer, more pastoral hum of bees zigzagging their way between hive
and flower. As it happened, the bees’ population had also been decimated across
Europe during the war, in an epidemic apparently unrelated except by irony to the ...

Chapter Nine. From Pheromones to Sociobiology

The plaintive songs of the impoverished American Deep South were more
than an ocean away from the worthy strains of Monsieur Emery’s teetotal choristers
of Lausanne. Yet despite their vastly di=erent origins, Edward Wilson shared
with Auguste Forel a lonely childhood. In Wilson’s case this was due to the ...

Conclusion

Sick of hearing King Solomon’s exhortation quoted in every banal piece of
writing about ants, the myrmecologist George Wheeler penned an article in 1957
feelingly entitled, “Don’t Go to the Ant.”1 With similar skepticism, Max Beerbohm
noted, “the ant has a lesson to teach us all, and it is not good.”2 Ezra Pound, ...

Notes

Essay on Sources

A discipline so undisciplined as myrmecology presents a considerable challenge when
it comes to sources. Its participants are scattered around the world in a variety of institutions,
or none, and its context varies from popular science to academic zoology, via psychology,
linguistics, and psychiatry (to name but three related fields). My starting point for the ...

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